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Jack Cashill Reviews “Expelled”

A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, brought a Kansas City audience to its feet.

And with good cause. Stein’s often funny, always engaging frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever.

As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent.

The winter started early when in November two separate labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells.

Just two years earlier, the elfin journalist Chris Mooney had likened adult stem cell research to creationism and assured the readers of his best seller, The Republican War on Science, that this “dogma” had been “resoundingly rejected by researchers actually working in the field.”

As the winter rolled on, and as all four major global temperature tracking outlets showed a precipitous drop in annual global temperature, and as snow fell in Baghdad for the first time in recorded history, only Al Gore remained in meltdown.

Jack is a very talented writer and a highly gifted investigator. I don’t always agree with the end results of his conclusions but you can bet that they are feasible. I emailed him before with a few questions about some of his work and he promptly wrote me back. Jack is a man who is constantly seeking the truth when political corruption is all abound. IMOP he’s a pretty good guy and a gentlemen as well.

all four major global temperature tracking outlets showed a precipitous drop in annual global temperature

and

The new theory predicts that greenhouse gas increases should result in small, but very rapid temperature spikes, followed by much longer, slower periods of cooling — exactly what the paleoclimatic record demonstrates.

The prediction of the new theory is much more plausible than the interpretation of recent temperature data. Something the article does not remind us is that the periods of cooling in the paleoclimatic record are accompanied by decreases in atmospheric CO2 levels. That is, the theory says there’s a limit to how far greenhouse warming can go. It does not say that global temperatures will fall while CO2 levels remain high.

Thanks to a plot linked to by BarryA, it’s easy to see what’s going on with the ballyhooed temperature drop. To borrow a term from economics, the data are highly volatile (“spikey”), and all one had to do observe a big drop in temperature was watch long enough. There’s no statistical significance in the recent temperature change. A rather subtle bit of manipulation is the emphasis on a twelve-month change. Keep in mind that you’re looking at global temperatures, and that when it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Note that the ticks on the time axis correspond to 25-month, not 12-month, increments.

Note also that Jan07 is only the third highest peak in the data, and that Jan08 is only the third lowest dip. In other words, we have not recently seen the most extreme temperatures, but the most extreme swing. The two dips below the long term average temperature (equated to 0 degrees in the plot) occurred years ago, between months 50 and 75. One might have claimed back then that global warming had been reversed, but one would have had egg on one’s face in the following 25 months.

The safest way to interpret such “spikey” data is to fit a straight line to them. The upward trend in the data is so strong that it’s easy to do this visually. Don’t take my word for it — look for yourself. If the new theory is right, then you will eventually see a straight line fit to the data of, say, the preceding ten years level out. And if CO2 levels drop, then the line will start to go downward, but with a slope less steep than the upward slope you see now.

As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent.

Most Americans interested in science know how to read a plot, and it’s not hard to get them to see what’s in the data, even if they missed it at first. Evolutionary theory, for all its apparent simplicity, is enormously more complicated than any plot. And it’s therefore much easier to mislead people with simplistic interpretations of evolutionary theory than it is to get them to hastily overlook prominent features of a plot.

What’s funny is I read your entire post and couldn’t for the life of me decide which side you were on.

The irrational view: GW is something we should be really worried about and since we can make really accurate predictions about what climate will be like in 50 years, we ought to spend megabucks on stopping it now.

Or the rational view: GW ( even if it is really happening ) something we probably can’t do much about due to its overwhelming dependence on things we can’t control.